It has been estimated that the market for wearable devices in the sports and health sectors will grow to nearly 170 million devices by 2017—an annual growth rate of 41 percent. In wearable devices, size is critical for user comfort. However, there is a scarcity of suitably small interconnection elements, of the sort that may be used for a miniaturized external port, such as a headset, speaker, data or charging port, or to connect multiple body worn units together. Radio transmission can be used as wire replacement for data exchange, but it increases power consumption, leading to a need for larger batteries, especially when mesh networking protocols must be implemented (as is the case with Bluetooth), thus imposing a limit on miniaturization.
Many commercially available miniaturized connectors such as those sold by Molex, such as their wire-to-board micro miniature interconnects, are meant to be used inside electronic devices, and not as an outside interconnect. Their size makes them very fragile, and not suited to being handled directly by a consumer. Most of these types of connectors, for example the PicoBlade, have a structurally fragile wire-to-connector junction on the wire side. They will eventually fail by repeated use, or if the wire is pulled accidentally.
Developing a custom connector is a difficult and expensive process, because, given the sizes, there is no reliable way of predicting the “feel” and strength of a particular configuration, until expensive tooling is created and the design is tested. Finalizing a design requires multiple iterations and production of costly tooling. Designing for small sizes is also quite demanding as the artifacts introduced by manufacturing processes, such as excess material, constitute a significant fraction of the volume or area of the product. Due to complexity, costs and time involved, custom miniature connector design cannot normally be part of the R&D cycle of a new consumer product.